1. Field of The Invention
The present invention relates generally to alphanumeric characters made of magnetic materials. More particularly, the present invention relates to a means for properly aligning flexible magnetic alphanumeric characters including and not limited to punctuations, simple shapes and figures that could be arranged to form words, phrases, sentences, selected patterns and a combination thereof.
2. Background of The Arts
When conveying and exchanging written information, alphanumeric characters are arranged to form words, phrases, sentences, figures, patterns, etc. Often, these groups of characters need to be changed and updated. It is also often necessary to be able to continually adapt the information to particular requirements and sizes; this would require a large stock of both background and foreground materials, most of which will be discarded after each use. This use and discard approach is environmentally inefficient and it is this inefficiency that my present invention is designed to address.
It will be seen that the alphanumeric characters in my present invention can be replaced and reused as many times as desired and also form words and/or phrases while assembled in a straight line.
Several proposals for displaying magnetic alphanumeric characters have been disclosed such as those shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,583,312 and 3,988,845. While the devices shown in these inventions can be used for alphanumeric character displays, they are generally designed such that one alphanumeric character is formed by several pieces of magnetic parts. A considerable amount of time is spent in getting these several parts to form one character. Further, U.S. Pat. No. 4,583,312 is suitable only for numeric characters and cannot be adequately used for alphabetic characters and punctuations.
It would therefore be highly desirable to have a set of alphanumeric characters that would properly attach to a metallic surface and also align with other characters to form words, phrases, sentences, figures, patterns, etc.